Saturday, September 25, 2010

A Nightmare on Elm Street

I noticed while surfing that the remake of this film was getting lots of attention. I’m still wondering why, I guess it was just released on DVD. However, I did find out an interesting tid-bit while investigating this.

But before I go into that I would like to say that I loved the initial trilogy of Nightmare films. Before they got too full of their own franchise.

They were cutting-edge (see what I did there) horror for their time and they introduced us to a number of actors we would see much later. Johnny Depp (before he was nicknamed Stinky) and Patricia Arquette.

I recently watched the first one again and it holds up – even after all these years. That is film-making.

I haven’t seen the remake but it looks good.

I can already tell from the trailer that there are plot holes. The original didn’t dwell on this as much as the new movie promises but if Freddy Krueger went after little kids while he was alive, why is he going after late teens now? Wouldn’t it make much more sense if the people having the nightmares were younger?

Plus this film seems to take itself far too seriously. That’s usually a recipe for disaster in just about any horror film. They’ve thrown out all of Freddy’s one-liners when they replaced Robert Englund with Jackie Earle Haley

The reviews for this film seem pretty much to agree. This is the same type of remake as Halloween was. The same sort of thing as Batman Begins where we find out a bit more about what makes our hero or villain tick. Where the film-maker tries to make them more human or less.

The reviews also suggest that the effects, however primitive, worked better in the first film.

The interesting tid-bit I found out was the Wes Craven was not pleased about them remaking the film because he wasn’t consulted about it. I would be a bit ticked off too.